


in too deep

by saraheli



Category: Block B
Genre: Actress Reader, Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage, Angst, F/M, Heavy Angst, Idol Park Kyung, Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 04:38:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14804520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saraheli/pseuds/saraheli
Summary: Your marriage to Park Kyung is for nothing more than money and fame, but when you two start breaking all of the rules to fall for each other, your relationship becomes more than what either of you expected.





	in too deep

“Okay, where do I sign?”

To say that your agent was surprised by your willingness to participate in this particular scheme would be a devastating understatement. She raised her eyebrows at you with a little scoff, leaning back in her seat. 

“Once you do this, there’s no going back. You know that, though. You’re a smart girl,” she patted a flat palm against the surface of the table between you. 

“Yes, I am. Now, out with it,” you curled your fingers in a gesture of encouragement, and she, with a mild shake of her head, slid the contract across the table to you.

Your relationship with Park Kyung would be set forth in three distinct stages: dating, marriage, and divorce.  After a significant lull in your acting career, your agent had made the unorthodox arrangement with the idol rapper personally, the two of you believing, in spite of what one might assume about Kyung, that this would be worth it as a mutually beneficial arrangement. The contract outlined the exact dates and guidelines, everything fitting into both of your pre-established schedules.

You were more than ready for this stunt, and, as you signed your name to the contract, you fantasized about the biography you would write for the public about the situation. However, when you met Park Kyung himself, you were surprised to find that he was not as shallowly invested as you had expected. He was kind and courteous, and, during the whole of your agreement conference, he, even though he was doing you more of a favor than you were doing him, was quick to accommodate anything you wanted. 

This did not faze you in the slightest, and, when he took you out on your first date in the public eye, you made sure he knew that you wouldn’t be so easy.

“Look,” you leaned forward onto your arms where they rested on the table, “I’m in this for the money just as much as you are, so you don’t have to pretend that anything else is going on.” 

Kyung let out a laugh, “Right, okay. I’ll keep that in mind.” 

The truth was, Kyung wasn’t in this for anything other than what you were, too. He was interested in the money and the upward progress, but he was not excited to lie to all of the people that supported him, and he was concerned that this wasn’t something that seemed to bother you in the slightest. 

He was marrying a liar, and so were you. So, he hated you both, but he would never let you or anyone else know that. 

He drummed his fingers on the table, his gaze matching that of a photographer in the window. He almost scoffed, but it turned into a near silent huff accompanied by an unpleasant grimace. You looked over your shoulder at them. 

“Aren’t we supposed to pretend that we don’t want to be seen?” 

Kyung shrugged and settled back into his seat a little more. Your eyes met, and he licked his lips. 

“All I know is that we are supposed to look like we  _ like _ each other,” he pushed his hand across the table so that it was a mere few centimeters from yours. 

Reluctantly, you wrapped your hand around his fingers. To anyone else, it might have looked like you had never learned how to hold hands, but his hand was dry and cold in your own, and you had to keep reminding yourself to smile, so it didn’t largely matter to you if your hands looked quite right. Fortunately for you, Kyung knew how to compensate. 

He brought your hand to his lips, and you could barely keep yourself from wincing. He raised his eyebrows at you knowingly before lowering the pair of your hands back to the table with a short laugh. 

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

 

That first day was six months ago, and what would come to pass would be more of the same. More clueless photographers, feigned smiles, and uncomfortable shared personal space: more things you didn’t know you hadn’t read about in the contract. And, now after all of this, you knew more about Kyung than you ever would have wanted to; you knew his favorite foods, his habits, and what time he woke up each morning. You knew him better than your lines for your upcoming drama pilot. 

He drove you crazy as he was so damn good at pretending to love you. He held you close and forced you to know what he smelled like. Cedar. Mint. Warm. He always held you by the lower curve of your waist. Intimate. You always cleared your throat when he got too close, but, as the months drew on, he reminded you that “too close” would keep getting closer. You knew he was right.

“That doesn’t mean I want you to touch me, Park.”

Kyung had raised his hands in surrender, “Trust me, I know.” 

That made you angry, but you didn’t let yourself think about that today. You weren’t allowed to be angry on your wedding day. All of it was for the cameras, after all, and they would easily be able to tell if something was wrong. 

But all of it was wrong; you hadn’t picked the location, the dress, or the groom, and you had a disturbing amount of trouble making yourself look even vaguely happy. Your agent told you to perk up, your friends whispered comforting things in your ear, and Kyung paid you a visit before the ceremony.

“You look…”

“Depressed? Yeah, I’ve been told.” 

You caught a glimpse of him in the mirror, and, to this day, you can’t be sure of what you saw. He appeared doe-eyed, his lips glistening and semi-parted as he stared at you. There was nothing suggestive in his gaze, and the air between you was loose and sweet. You shifted uncomfortably and looked down to your lap. 

He cleared his throat.

“Yeah,” you heard him scoff. You hated that your heart sank at his frankness. “I should probably go...superstition and all that.” He tacked a mumbled “be ready in fifteen” onto the end of his phrase before ducking back out into the hallway. You gritted your teeth.

Along with all of the unwanted closeness and dishonesty, Kyung found himself more and more frustrated with the way he let himself look at you. With affection, with interest: neither things were supposed to be you. You were supposed to be a nothing liar that made him feel nothing. You were supposed to be a paycheck, and the feeling was supposed to be mutual, and so far you were the only one holding up your end of the bargain. 

You were insufferable, and he wanted so desperately to fall away from you in time for phase three, but the wedding, in particular, made him believe that this would be impossible. There was something intoxicating about pretending to love you that made the “pretending” part more difficult and the “loving” part hotter in the back of his throat. He had to remind himself that day as he returned to his own dressing room of all of the things about you that made him cringe. 

You were stubborn and angry and greedy. Okay, maybe ambitious. You were selfish, though. No doubt about that. And you lied just like he did. 

He couldn’t deny that one. The two of you had met to carry out the longest lie he’d ever conceptualized, and any feelings budding in the pit of his stomach were planted by that deception. Rooted in something disgusting. He wondered how anything pure could come from that rotted soil. 

Kyung wondered, too, as he stood at the edge of the chamber waiting for you if the hatred behind your rosy cheeks and too-wide smile was true. He secretly wished that at least a portion of it was forced, encouraged and strengthened by the unbending nature of your resolve. He was disturbed by how much he feared was genuine. 

Luckily for him, however, those stars in your eyes were real. You didn’t even know they were there, but, as you made your way down the aisle to him, they were all he could see. Those stars knew before you did that the fluttering in your veins was more serious than you would ever have wanted. They knew that you loved his snark and his brains and his voice and that fucking cedar cologne that you pretended made you gag. 

“Smile for the camera,” he reminded you with a bitter laugh as he slipped the ring on your finger. 

And, after you met his eyes from that close, after breathing him in and pretending to make him yours, you were ruined. He followed suit when he tasted your “I do” straight from the source, and his heart raced as the world and your contract and your painful glares fell away into the blur of his periphery. 

 

The honeymoon had been a toss-up. Not in location or theme, but rather in whether or not it would happen at all. Kyung had insisted, and, though you were strangely comforted by the fact that he had, you clenched your jaw at the very prospect of sharing a room with him in a new place  _ alone _ had you shivering. You grimaced. 

“Something to say?” Your agent asked, leaning forward onto her elbows. 

“I guess I’m just not understanding how us wasting money to stay in a fancy hotel and supposedly ogle at each other behind closed doors serves any purpose to the contract. I didn’t sign up for it, and it offers no benefits to me.” You shrugged, and Kyung let out a huff through his nose. 

“Well, the photos would go easily, and the publicity is priceless,” he remarked bluntly. 

Your agent gestured to him with a little wave as if to tell you that his sentiment had been the obvious answer and that you must have been blind if you hadn’t seen it. You rolled your eyes. 

“Okay, fair,” you tilted your head to the side. “But that doesn’t explain where the money is coming from.”

Kyung smiled a little. “Darling,” he began in a voice thin and condescending. “Don’t you worry about a thing. I’ll take care of it.” 

And so he took care of it. You didn’t see any of the inner workings, and he wouldn’t tell you anything no matter how many times you asked—which was almost a thousand, according to Kyung’s estimation. He would always hush you and set his hands on your shoulders in a way that, from any partner not bound by a legal agreement, might have been comforting. It made your stomach sink when it came from him: closeness. It made your skin sting with desire for the situation—your life—to be different. 

By this point, now that you were fake-married and flying over the ocean hand-in-hand with a lie, you knew what was wrong with you. You were in love with Park Kyung, and you had broken every one of your own rules to do so. 

You stared out the airplane window, watching the darkened clouds float lazily by, and you were reminded how little time you had left. 

“Funny, right?” You said suddenly, interrupting the near-silence of the plane’s interior. 

Kyung opened his eyes, having been nearly asleep beside you. He cleared his throat and sat up. 

“What’s funny?” 

“That we’re going on our honeymoon like we don’t know that we’ll be divorced in under a year. That we’re here at all, I guess. Like, what’s the point? They already believe it, we’re already winning this game that  _ we _ fucking _ created _ , so I guess it’s just funny that I’m sitting here with you going somewhere for no reason under the guise of being fake-married.”

You punctuated your sentence with a bitter little laugh, shaking your head. When you finally looked at him, you were surprised to find him looking at you with bewilderment. Your uncomfortable laughter trailed off, and you furrowed your eyebrows. 

“You’re right,” he shifted forward. “That is funny.” 

His tone was strange, and you didn’t know if you should laugh or look away. You swallowed. 

“I wanted to come on this trip because, and I’m only telling you because it’s late and you’re on my last nerves, I wanted to be close to you for as long as I could because,  _ shit, _  you think I don’t know this is ending? I know, and I know that all of this is a big  _ fucking  _ mess, and the worst part of all of it is that I don’t want it to end.” 

His whispers were sharp and dark, and his words filled your ears like rounds of cotton. Your mouth hung open comically. 

“I know you don’t want that. I know you want this…” he gestured between the two of you, “whatever it means to you, to be over. I know. But I’m not ready because I’ve been thinking about that one stupid kiss at our fake wedding, and I just keep trying to convince myself that it was real.” 

“What was real? We  _ did _ kiss.”

“That feeling. I felt...more than I know that I should have.” He swallowed uncomfortably and continued, “I know that this is just...coming out of nowhere to you, but, well, I’ve been holding it in for months. I’m sorry.” He shook his head. 

All of this seemed so uncharacteristic of Kyung. Normally so confident and self-assured, he was meek and afraid. He was afraid of disappointing you; afraid of your rejection. 

“Shit, I shouldn’t have said any of that,” Kyung looked around the cabin, desperate to find somewhere to escape from the situation. 

His heart was pounding in his throat, trying to suffocate him as punishment for making things harder than they needed to be. He was so frustrated with himself for surrendering to you and for letting himself break down beneath the lie he’d created. 

“No,” your voice sounded disjointed as you finally responded. “I’m glad you—look, I’m...I’m not good at this kind of thing. Feelings, being genuine, that...all of that is hard for me, but I think I know what you’re feeling. I, um, I’ve been feeling something, too. I don’t know what it means, but I know it’s going to fuck all of this up for me, too.” 

You looked down into your lap, trying to hide the way your face was burning. You wondered if you would throw up from the way that your stomach was flipping. 

You hadn’t been “in love” with someone since you were a teenager. The craze and the intensity had made you sick back then, and you became so invested in making your own future that you simply didn’t have time to feel it again. Now, though, Kyung was both a good career move and someone who fucked up your mind and made you want to fold into him and disappear, and you were overwhelmed by the prospect of being able to have it all even if it was just for a few months. 

For the rest of the flight, you said nothing. This made you and Kyung feel infinitely worse, but what could you say? Anything you could have said threatened to ruin things further within the confines of an airplane cabin, and you thought that you may as well wait to do so until you were in a place you could each escape from. 

You dropped your bag by the window and turned to face him in the hotel room.

“About what we said before...on the plane, about feelings and all that...we don’t have to do anything with it if you think it’ll make things more difficult.” You said flatly, your mouth curved bitterly into an uncomfortable semi-frown. 

“It will,” Kyung confirmed. He sat down on the bed with a sigh. “Let’s...can we…”

“What? Enjoy it while we can? Tell the company? Tell everyone to fuck off and run off into the sunset together? There’s not an easy way to deal with this besides ignoring it—”

“That’s the easy way for you?” 

You swallowed, your face disfiguring in confusion as you felt yourself blush. 

“I think it’s easier than kidding ourselves, Kyung.” 

He sucked in a breath through his nose and shook his head. He chuckled quietly, “I just think it’s funny that you just admitted to being in love with me, and yet you still treat me like you have to keep pretending to despise you.”

You raised your eyebrows, “Last I checked, love and contempt aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.”

He laughed again, folding his hands in his lap. 

“What’ll we do then?” 

The silence that followed his question made you bold from fear. You crossed the room, and, for the first time in weeks beyond the scope of your repressed fantasies, you took Kyung’s face in your shaky hands. 

He looked uneasy, setting his hands over yours, “I don’t think this will help.”

“Can we figure out how to fix it in the morning?” 

Kyung looked up at you through his eyelashes, biting his lip. He nodded slowly, begging himself to keep in his right mind as you leaned down to meet your lips with his. His frantic thoughts melted away as he tasted you again; he relished in the fact that you kissed him first and that he was kissing you for no one but himself. No cameras, no audiences, no world watching. 

And you relished, too, in that you didn’t have to fix anything now. For this moment, even if it was just for the night, everything was fine. 


End file.
